


The weeping stone

by Gabriel4Sam



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, The Mummy (1999)
Genre: Crossover, Episode: s03e18 The Citadel, F/M, Gen, M/M, The Medjai are keeping a lot of Egypt' secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26532508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabriel4Sam/pseuds/Gabriel4Sam
Summary: Jonathan finds a strange amulet and a story which began a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, writes a new chapter....
Relationships: Ardeth Bay/Jonathan Carnahan, Evy Carnahan O'Connell/Rick O'Connell, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Infinite Sadness
Comments: 9
Kudos: 45





	The weeping stone

**Author's Note:**

> The ever patient Wrennette beta-ed this fic. Also, her fics are wonderful and you should read them!

The weeping stone

Our story started a long, long time ago and in a galaxy far away and never really ended. There was just a pause. A long pause. Eons passed.

And then it started again, just like that: 

Two men, alone and desperately human, fighting against abominations from the dawn of civilisation. Monsters with a taste for human flesh. One favoured his left side. They made their last stand at the forgotten temple of a forgotten goddess, erased from human memory with great care by Ptolemy III Euergetes, his mages and what would become the Medjai, more than two centuries before the modern era. A forgotten goddess now trying to make a comeback heralded in blood, famine, and other happy events.

Those men should have never left the scene, or only in very, very, very tiny bits.

Sadly for the beasts, that sort of situation had become terrifyingly normal for Jonathan and Ardeth.

Not everybody can have exotic dancers as a bad habit, like most of Jonathan’s Oxford friends.

With a yell like a woodsman putting the last axe wound in a giant tree, Ardeth cut in two the latest giant crocodile with two heads. The left head, apparently not the quickest to apprehend new circumstances, continued to flail a moment. Ardeth watched it carefully, with an air clearly meaning:  _ Try it, if you dare _ .

Since no one glared like Ardeth, the left head wisely died, instead of incurring his wrath again.

“These things definitely don't conform to the traditional representation,” Jonathan remarked, with the blasé attitude of a man who had become sadly used to giant animals with too many heads, resurrected priests and other fun ways to pass the time in the charming country of Egypt. If he didn’t go bankrupt every time he put a foot on the soil of the Mother country, he would have refused to leave England. There, dead things stayed dead and even if Arthur had risen, Jonathan was sure the lad would have been much more amiable than Imhotep.

Perhaps it was a question of the soil temperature…. Would dead English sovereigns rise if transplanted in Egypt? Or Scottish ones? The Scottish ones seemed more fun.

“Carnahan, stop dreaming and come help,” Ardeth ordered and Jonathan thought of protesting. Harvesting hearts of two-headed magical creatures was gory and smelly. Even if it was to stop a giant wave of drought which would devastate Egypt and probably cause a lot of deaths. But Jonathan had seen enough death during the Great War; deaths he could never forget, no matter what new horrors Evy and her brand new husband Rick, and Ardeth, half friend half pain in the ass in Jonathan’s opinion, discovered every day.

“Life was so much simpler without the supernatural,” Jonathan grumbled, but it was weak and he went to help. The sooner they had the hearts, the quicker they could leave, and supposing Evy and Rick had successfully harvested the brains of their own two-headed monsters, they could stop the drought, leave their third lost temple this year and go back to Jonathan favourite way to pass life: searching for a way to earn money.

Preferably without the dead rising, for once.

They stayed with the Medjai for the night, since it would have been pretty stupid to try returning to the city after dark. The night was beautiful, all stars and an enormous moon and Jonathan was finding himself quite enamoured with life. His sister and her husband disappeared into their tent and he hoped they remembered they were not alone and currently surrounded only by cloth.

The Medjai were extremely pleasant hosts, even Ardeth for all his glaring, and whatever the pastries and strange herbal tea they were distributing were almost making Jonathan not care they didn’t drink alcohol… or that Ardeth took Jonathan’s secret stash at the beginning of their current adventure to prepare a makeshift bomb.

Against a giant Mesopotamian… _ thing _ , because evidently the local monsters and undead weren’t enough. Some had apparently been imported too.

Jonathan let himself fall into the nest of covers loaned to him for the night. He was sore, but not too bruised, and the satisfaction of saving people had an edge even a cynic like him couldn’t deny.

“You know, the only thing missing is gallant company. Not that yours isn’t charming, old chap, but nothing beat a scandalously clothed lady. With the bosom, you know,” Jonathan said, gesticulating to illustrate.

Ardeth grunted and didn’t answer.

“But perhaps there is a Mrs. Bey in one of the tents? Or several? Are your people polygamists? Because that’s something I could get behind. Never too much of a good thing, you know, even if I always asked myself how it worked. I mean, some men must go without riches for other to have more? Very capitalistic and –“

“Carnahan, stop babbling. And no, there isn’t a Mrs. Bey, as you say. And if there was, you would be literally the last person in this country I would introduce to her.”

“Rude!”

“Sleep, Jonathan. We leave at dawn and I don’t enjoy having to throw water at you to force you to rise.”

“No need to grumble. Also, you totally enjoy it! And I’m sure you’ll find the perfect Mrs. Bey one day and sweep her off her feet. Very heroically, probably. There will be fireworks, old chap! ”

“Thanks, I suppose. But this isn’t…. My friend, there is-“

A snore interrupted him.

Ardeth turned to the side. Jonathan Carnahan had succumbed to the exhaustion of the day. Ardeth snorted, amused despite himself, and happy his confidences to his grating, but strangely attaching, friend had been stopped just in the nick of time. Some words couldn’t be unsaid. And he liked the Carnahan and O’Connell trio, despite their habit of stumbling exactly where they shouldn’t. He went on his last stroll around the camp, saluting the sentinels, as was his habit before sleep, and didn’t think any more of this conversation. Sadly, the sudden interest of Jonathan about his love life distracted him enough – should he tell him the truth or not, the English could be very strange about that – that he forgot for a moment a bad habit of Jonathan, where he pickpocketed everything shiny like an overgrown Oxford-educated magpie, and didn’t go through his pockets like he ought to after one of their expeditions.

Therefore, Ardeth missed the amulet in Jonathan’s vest, found in the temple of the day. And he missed the crystal, strange, shining, definitely nothing he had seen before, embedded in it.

***************************************

_ A woman was leaning down over Jonathan. She wore the strangest headdress he had ever seen, with two long tails of bizarre material, blue and white, and it was also crowning her, giving her a royal air, despite the blood running down her face. There was something slightly wrong about her face, like the proportions were slightly different from what they should normally be in a human. _

_ “I’m sorry,” she was saying. “I’m sorry, Master, this is the only way to be sure he doesn’t get you too. Someone will come find you. The Alliance has our coordinates, they will find you.” _

_ An older man stepped up behind her and he was bleeding too, the left part of his face a terrible wound, which had taken one of his eyes. The blood congealed on his beard and he used the wall to stay upright. The still intact eye shined with determination despite the probably terrible pain. _

_ “Ahsoka, there isn’t time left,” he said and something sharp came to mask the despair on the woman’s face. _

_ “I know,” she said. She took something from around her neck and it was the strange crystal in the amulet Jonathan had found. She leaned down and placed it on Jonathan.“Anakin’s crystal,” she said. “May you use it more wisely than him.” _

_ She pushed a metal cover over Jonathan and it seemed so much like the lid of a sarcophagus. Jonathan wanted to yell for help but he was paralyzed. The last thing he saw was the woman turning, two swords of white flame in her hands, then whatever he was lying on went far away. There was an acceleration, like a plane taking off, and Jonathan knew nothing but the cold light of stars. _

***************************************

Jonathan woke up shivering, his mouth already open to cry out. Ardeth was on the other side of the campfire, getting it going again for the morning tea.

“First time I've seen you up without help,” Ardeth smiled, but his smile died when he got a better look at the other man’s face.

“Jonathan?”

“Just…just a nightmare.”

Ardeth wisely nodded. Even he, who had been trained all his life to protect humanity from what was laying underneath the sands of Egypt and the neighbouring countries, would sometimes be visited in his dreams by the horrors he was regularly exposed to.

In silence, Ardeth offered his water skin for Jonathan to rinse the bilious taste of nightmares from his mouth.

***************************************

_ The woman was there again. The one with the strange headdress going down on either side of her head. The headdress was smaller and the tattoos on her face smaller too, like they hadn’t been finished. She was silently watching the cold coffin Jonathan was in, agony on her face. _

_ “Oh Master,” she only said. “If only you were there… Really there. More than ever, I need your help.” _

_ A man entered the room. He had brown skin, brown hair too long for even Cambridge and smart eyes. _

_ “The Ghost is leaving in ten minutes, we can’t afford more.” _

_ “I’m ready, tell Hera I will be on board.” The woman with the headdress said. Jonathan wanted to yell at her to take him with her, that he wanted to help, that it was his responsibility to help, but his mouth was cold and his tongue dead inside it, like a block of ice. _

***************************************

“Don’t you think your brother is…you know?” Rick asked one morning and Evelyn’s eyes left the reproduction of a Nekhen tomb painting she was admiring, realized she was about to put marmalade in her tea, took her glasses off and turned to her husband. Rick hadn’t put his shirt on yet, a fact she deeply appreciated.

“There are many answers to that question and some of them are about secrets I swore to take to my tomb when we were teenagers, so I will need you to elaborate, darling.”

“Don’t you think your brother is strange?”

“Did he try to convince you to invest in a bar in Casablanca again?”

“If I was trying to start a business with him, I would be the strange one. No, I mean, don’t you think he’s stranger than usual?”

As one, they turned to the patio of the decrepit house they were renting in Damietta.

It was eight in the morning and Jonathan was up.

That itself was strange.

Not that Jonathan couldn’t, in crisis time, wake early. But when they were still recuperating from their latest adventure, he liked to only get up at what he called “the crack of dawn,” meaning something like thirteen o'clock.

Eight in the morning, and he was awake, seeping tea slowly, and trying the meditation Ardeth had once tried to teach him, before pronouncing him totally inept. That itself was strange. The tears slowly flowing on his cheeks were making it unreal. 

Jonathan hadn’t shed a tear since coming back from the trenches of the Great War. What he had lived through there had used up all the tears for one life. After, there was only room for laughter, sometimes slightly hysterical, alcohol, and women of ill repute, with the occasional supernatural menace.

“I think the last mission we accompanied Ardeth on was particularly difficult for him.”

“Nobody died!” Rick protested. “Nobody didn’t even almost died!”

“Dear God, we’re setting the bar quite low those last months….”

Rick turned again to Jonathan. At the beginning of his marriage to Evy, he had seen Jonathan more as an unfortunate consequence of Evelyn, someone to endure, until they had bonded with their experiences from the war. Some things they had shared with each other, they hadn’t even told Evy, the most important person in both their lives.

“I’m taking him for a drink tonight with my old buddies from the Legion,” Rick decided. “Mano a mano.”

“That really doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Evelyn smiled and Rick couldn’t resist that smile, never had, and he swallowed an impromptu Latin lesson with a tender kiss, which lead to other things, and Evelyn quite late in her morning program for the study of the Nekhen tomb paintings.

***************************************************

_ There was a demon, more frightening than Imhotep himself. It was black, prowling in the shadows around Jonathan. The only thing Jonathan could perceive of it, a noise like lethal gas escaping its canister. The thing, the monster, the nightmare, carried a sword made of blood and at its feet lay the bodies of everyone Jonathan had ever loved. _

_ Lost. _

_ All of them were lost, because Jonathan had not been enough. _

_ The despair should have a taste but Jonathan hadn’t tasted anything in years. There was just the cold, the after taste; spicy, of the last thing he had tasted, long ago, months ago, years ago, centuries ago, before laying down in his tomb, silent, vigilant witness of the end of everything and the rise of darkness. _

****************************************************

Rick and Evelyn were waiting for him when he got back from his nightly walk. He had exchanged his usual nightly shenanigans in bars for slow walks across the landscape. By day, the sounds of so many people had become a torture and even at night, it was like Jonathan could feel them pressing around him. Only in the empty surroundings of Damietta could he find peace now, following the stars, which always seemed wrong to him, like they were in an incorrect configuration.

“Evy?” Jonathan asked, surprised, because they were always in bed when he came back.

“This is an intervention,” his sister said.

“Oh come on. I swear to you, I haven’t started using again. I know the effect of Forced Marche on me, I wouldn’t…"

“I know, darling,” Evy said with warmth, taking his hand in a gesture of comfort. “I know you wouldn’t do that to me, or to yourself again. But, you have been…you haven’t been yourself, those last weeks. At first, I confess I thought you were, how do I say it-“

“Hitting the bottle pretty hard,” Rick completed with no tact at all.

“But I remembered when you started to change and I called a specialist.”

There was a movement behind Jonathan and he turned and Ardeth was there, his face harder than Jonathan had seen in a long time. And in his hand, cradled like the simple contact was dangerous, was the amulet with the crystal Jonathan had found weeks ago, abandoned on the red sandstone altar in a temple of a forgotten goddess in Latopolis.

“That’s mine,” Jonathan yelled immediately, his hands raising to seize the jewel, but Rick’s arms were around his shoulders, as hard as steel.

“I failed you, my friend,” Ardeth said gravely.

“Ardeth, that’s mine!” Jonathan said again, already suffocating on tears, “That’s the only thing I have left!”

Another Medjai was there, one Jonathan didn’t know, and a foul-smelling cloth was across Jonathan's mouth, and he struggled, but Rick was stronger, and Ardeth was there too, helping Rick contain his thrashing, and the last thing he heard was Evelyn crying.

Beyond his eyelids, for a second, he would have sworn Evelyn’s silhouette was different, her belly round as the sun, and shining too, shining like a newborn star, but it made no sense and he lost himself to the dark of drugged sleep. 

********************************************************

_ The woman was there again. There was a man with her, blond hair, brown skin, a hand on her shoulder, comforting her as she put her two hands on the lid of Jonathan’s sarcophagus. Behind them, there was a man with darker skin and a dash of yellow across his nose and even if Jonathan had never seen him in his life, he wanted to beg him to take care of her, of her and the first man, the blond one, because if Jonathan himself couldn’t, this man with the yellow markings was almost him, brother, support, friend. _

********************************************************

Jonathan woke up in a tent. Someone had tied his ankles together, not tight enough to stop him from walking, but tight enough to stop him from running. Ardeth was there, offering him a cup of tea, and even if Jonathan wanted to throw it to his face, his throat was parched. He accepted it.

“Was it poisoned?” Jonathan asked, voice hard with anger, once he had drunk everything.

“No, it wasn’t, and this is perhaps a question you should ask before accepting a drink.”

“Well, not like I can stop you, as the last hours demonstrated!”

“I understand you’re angry.”

“Well, you’re so brilliant to decipher emotion, if Medjai doesn’t work, perhaps you could become a disciple of Mister Freud.”

“We’re here to help you.”

“You have a strange way to show it,” Jonathan pointed out.

At that moment, the flap of the tent opened. Jonathan’s heart jumped in his chest. It was Evelyn and Rick and the sense of betrayal went higher. Ardeth was a friend, a good one, yes, but still only a friend. Rick and Evy were family. Family wasn’t supposed to betray each other. 

Ages old grief rose. Older than Jonathan, older than twice cursed Imothep, older than every temple in Egypt, and he choked on the wave of anguish. The infinite sadness was the only thing in his soul and it went higher, plugging his lungs, crushing his heart. On his cheeks tears started to flow again and he would have died of this pain, it was impossible to survive such sorrow.

Hands found his own. Darker hands with tattoos. Ardeth’s hands, scarred and dependable, hands which had saved Jonathan’s life countless times. 

A head was against his. Dark hair, the same as his, and their mother perfume, and the embrace of blood, a link he only had with Evey now, their English family dead and buried, but Evy, Evy was there, his beloved sister, and they had survived so much together, from their parents’ loss to the countless disappointments of life. 

Strong arms around his shoulder, his waist and the scent of that awful cologne. Rick. Rick, who made Evy happy, Rick who had seen the trenches too, Rick, the brother their parents didn’t have the time to give him.

Jonathan crashed into his body and into reality with all the grace of a drunk camel trying to run across a dune.

“What’s wrong with me!” He yelled, quite strongly, into poor Rick’s ears.

There was some fussing, a fortifying  _ potion _ poured by Rick into Jonathan’s tea, despite Ardeth’s opinion that alcohol really wouldn’t help Jonathan, then they congregated around the fire with stew and explanations. Jonathan was famished. It was like he had survived only on tea and slow walks across the Egyptian landscapes for days.

“It was a very long time ago,” Ardeth explained. “During the Thinite Confederacy, before even the First Dynasty. One day a great fire fell from the sky into the desert. The tribes which formed the Confederacy sent an expedition to follow the trail of the fire and they found a great stone at the centre of a dune entirely crystallized, like an intense fire would have done. They brought back the stone to the city. Little by little, the members of the expedition who found it began to have visions. They could predict other tribes attack, they could sometimes know where a venomous snake was waiting in a bush, they knew where to go for good game in the hunts…”

“Seems like a pretty friendly stone,” Rick commented. “Very useful stuff.”

“But their new talents had a price,” Ardeth continued, like Rick hadn’t interrupted him. “The ones with the most talent, the ones who could sometimes heal wounds or ease a birth for example, were the most touched. They wept during feasts, they yelled into the night, they were taken apart by-“

“Sadness,” Jonathan said. “Infinite sadness.”

Ardeth nodded. Evelyn’s hand found her brother’s own hand and pressed on it.

“Most of them took their own life, at the end. A temple was built, coming from a vision one of the men touched by the stone had and the stone placed in the sanctuary. Once a year, young people were send to it to earn its wisdom.”

“That’s…that’s quite cold,” Evely shivered, “They were sacrificed. Fated to kill themselves or go crazy.”

“Yes, they were. Officially, they were designed by the oracles, but of course, most were chosen as a way for the most powerful to strike down their enemies.”

“Charming.”

“Some of them survived. They endured and went to become great souls, leading their people, or taking the places of advisors of the proto-kings. They said Menes, the founder of the first dynasty was one of them, that used what he learned from the stone to unify Egypt. They also said that the stone stopped talking to him because of the bloodshed, and that is why he was killed by a hippopotamus, because he had gotten too close to the beast, confident in a gift which had been taken back. They also said that Menes was the only one ever succeeding in opening the stone, and that he never said what was inside. Simply brought back that strange crystal in the amulet Jonathan stole.”

“Liberated, thank you very much,” Jonathan interrupted.

“All of this is fascinating,” Evelyn admitted. “But if we need the stone to help Jonathan…” Her brother was quite touched. For Evy, Evy! To interrupt Egyptian story time like that….

Ardeth nodded again.

“Yes, we need the stone and, praise Allah, I know where it is. The temple is in Thinis. Some said the weeping stone contributed to the abandonment of the city for Memphis as a capital.”

“Then we have a problem,” Evelyn realized. “Nobody has ever found Thinis.”

“The  _ English _ haven’t,” Ardeth said with half a smirk and Evelyn made the same noise Rick made when he found a scorpion in their bathroom.

“We had this conversation before,” Rick immediately intervened, before Evelyn lost herself in an archaeological rant. “Ardeth certainly doesn’t have to tell you everything his people know and keep from the scientists.”

He kissed her pout. Knowledge was Evelyn’s grail and she could become a little insensitive to indigenous peoples' reasons for keeping secrets in her quest., Nobody was perfect, neither she or he or Ardeth, and their friendship could endure some friction.

**********************************************************

_ The woman had come back again. On Jonathan's coffin, she placed a strange helmet, white and half burned… _

_ “Cody,” she said, then a long silence and she added: “He was himself at the end. He called for you.” And, in his coffin, Jonathan’s heart wept, like another wound had been added to his burden. _

**********************************************************

Jonathan woke up kneeling, his face close, too close to the dying embers of the campfire. Ardeth hands, steel strong, the only things stopping him from burning himself.

A grief too big to bear pulsed in his heart, something so immense he couldn’t swallow it. He turned to Ardeth and saw in his friend’s eyes compassion and support. He didn’t deserve that man’s friendship. Friends could be taken so quickly, died in a flourish of a blade, Jonathan should….No, no, those thoughts weren’t his. Ardeth was a dear friend, yes, but he was in no danger of any blade.

It was such a freezing thought to realize the inside of his own brain weren’t exactly his own anymore.

“How far away is this city again?” Jonathan asked.

***********************************************************

Later, when Jonathan, pale and with too deep shadow beneath his eyes, had been put to sleep by a few drops of a potion made by one the Medjai specialist, Ardeth, Rick and Evelyn divided the hours of day and night between the three of them.

Jonathan couldn’t be left alone.

They left the camp at dawn, escorted by ten of Ardeth’s men. Jonathan was trying very hard to put his persona on, like a mask, and Rick was keeping him company at the moment, so Evelyn guided her camel next to Ardeth.

“Are you here to grill me about Thinis' secrets?” Ardeth asked and she made a face.

“I’m sorry,” Evey admitted. “Sometimes I lose myself in my desire for knowledge and I act harshly. I wouldn’t want you to think your friendship is only a means to me.”

“I know the truth of your heart, Evelyn O’Connell,” the Medjai simply said. “You are a good person, if not a very patient one. Which is a surprise for a woman capable of speaking ten dead languages.”

“Only nine,” Evey corrected and everything in her tone confessed she found it a terrible shortfall on her part.

He smiled and didn’t admit to her he spoke more. Instead, he told her old tales of the lost city of Thinis, stories of the beginning of Egypt, when the Medjai were simply one tribe of several, before the rise of the united country, before the Pharaohs. Evelyn listened, eyes shining. In return, she recited the  _ Culhwch and Olwen _ to him, translating on the fly from middle Welsh to English and Ardeth was in turn fascinated.

“When Jonathan is healed,” Ardeth said, refusing to entertain the idea that his friend could die. “I think I would like to see your country.”

“I would like to be your guide,” Evelyn answered, “and to guide you to its secrets. Even if we are sadly lacking in lost magic cities.”

“Perhaps we will find them together,” Ardeth said. “Perhaps there are Medjai in your country, keeping its secrets, like my brothers and myself are keeping the secrets of Egypt.”

***************************************************************

_ There was a child. A small, strange child, with green skin and a bizarre headdress. She was a girl, and young, so young, and Jonathan knew that one day, she would have been his to teach. He had always known and she had too, and sometimes, when he could, he had visited her and the other children, happy to see her grow safe and happy, like every child should. _

_ But a shadow entered the room. A shadow with a cowl obscuring its face, but Jonathan knew. He knew that shadow had been his child too and if his lips were sealed by cold and death, his heart yelled and cried and raged, as the shadow cut in two the one who should have been his sister. _

***************************************************************

Thinis slept under the sand but the Medjai knew a way. They always knew a way, custodians of so many secrets. Ardeth guided their small expedition and they started to dig, taking turns, to excavate the entry to the lost city.

“How long since you last dug it out?” Rick grumbled, as he was on the team excavating the sand. “It seems that door hasn’t seen the light of the sun since it was built, with all this freaking sand on it.”

“We haven’t come back since the sixteenth century,” Ardeth explained. “The amulet was stolen from a group of Medjai at that time, and we tracked the buyer, and tried to save his son who had touched the crystal.”

“And did it work?”

Ardet’s grimace told everything of the answer.

“Perfect, just perfect,” Rick growled and he started to work even harder.

Once the path to the door was cleared out, Ardeth left half his men outside on guard with Evelyn and Rick, and entered the city with Jonathan and the rest of the Medjai. Evelyn had protested, and Rick too, and it was Jonathan’s own voice that finally had convinced them. How could he fight the despair in his soul, if he was afraid for his family?

“You’re going with Ardeth!” Evelyn had protested and the Medjai had been touched by this casual inclusion in their family.

“Sometimes attachment isn’t enough,” Ardeth had told the young woman. “We have been trained since childhood for this. We won’t fail your brother. We won’t fail our friend in his time of need.”

The Medjai had been trained for this. To protect the world from everything that slept under the sand. To stand guard, silent, vigilant, between the people of Egypt and the different horrors the past had left. Ardeth thought about that as they progressed. It was his duty and also his honour, but even he found the slow walk into the city buried under the sand difficult.

Not physically.

Here, there weren't any of the traps or undead abominations which had marked his first adventure with Rick and company, when together they had stopped Imothep.

No, the difficulty was in all their hearts and it didn’t come from their own feelings. It was a song of despair, of infinite sadness, a grief which tore them apart and still asked for more. But where men of the past had succumbed, the Medjai didn’t. Perhaps the only ones who wouldn’t. 

Duty. A life offered to duty. The desire to protect, even the people who didn’t understand them, who would have spit on their way of life. That was the Medjai way. And whatever was waiting for them in the heart of the city understood that, perhaps more than anything else in the world.

Perhaps even more than infinite sadness.

Duty, even in the time of grief.

For this, the warriors and Jonathan arrived alive at the ruined temple. Gritting their teeth against despair, but alive, if slightly dusty. Ardeth left his men there and guided Jonathan further in. The Englishman couldn’t walk anymore, despite courageous effort. Ardeth, a hand around his waist, dragged him into the sanctuary, and almost let go of him the moment they entered. In the light of the torch, the stone glittered in a way no stone should.

Slowly, Ardeth helped Jonathan to the base of the steps. When Jonathan was sitting down, he went closer to examine the stone. It was no stone, something his ancestors hadn’t included in their reports, perhaps for fear to seem insane.

Ardeth touched it.

It was metal, he was certain of it. A metal he couldn’t identify, but a metal. And there, at the base of it there was….

There was something deformed by heat, by time, by the shock of a crash in the desert centuries ago, but that a modern Medjai could identify where pre-pharaonic and fifteen centuries Medjai couldn’t.

Some sort of handle.

Some sort of  _ door handle _ ….

Ardeth, in a moment of dumb courage his Medjai teachers would have walloped his behind for, turned the handle. It was stuck, but with a bit of effort…

A hiss, stale air, and it opened.

On the stone floor, Jonathan had passed out.

Ardeth looked inside the stone which wasn’t a stone.

There was…there was some strange statue. A man. Certainly not Egyptian, but no people he could identify. Simply a man, very realistic, but only three-quarters of him could be seen, the rest lost in the mass of stone, or metal, behind him, like the sculptor had been interrupted. On the side, there was some metal contraption with lights, all red, and blinking like crazy. And one by one, they were going out.

Ardeth had half decided to throw Jonathan across his shoulders and start running, because he didn’t want to be there when the last one went out, when suddenly all of them failed and went dark.

There was a light, a noise, liquid falling on the floor, and a man stepped out of the statue, into Ardeth’s arms.

“Ahsoka,” he said, opening eyes as blue as the sky in the desert, and then he passed out. At the same time, a fog of grey lifted from Ardeth’s heart and he understood that whatever spell had come from the stone, the…thing, it was forever a thing of the past.

To say the Medjai, Rick and Evy were surprised to see half their team coming back with an extra member was an understatement. Their usual was more: 'sudden monster trying to eat their heart and liver,' not: 'mysterious human with red hair stepping out of a statue.' Nevertheless, camp was established, and Jonathan was examined from head to toe, then the man.

“He looks…normal,” was the very helpful diagnostic.

And he did. Only one head, blue eyes, red hair, red beard.

“He would seem more at his place in England, if not for the strange armour,” Evelyn commented, and then forget a little about their guest, because Jonathan had woken up. A little hungover, exhausted, but definitely himself.

And the stranger slept. Days after days. As they stayed in camp the time necessary to let Evelyn visit the ruins, which was both the sweetest gift the Medjai could give her, and the cruellest. The sweetest, because her soul thirsting for knowledge saw and learned things no archaeologist had ever dreamed off. The cruellest, because she could never talk about it, or publish about it, or even use the knowledge gained. Then they hid the entry of the city again and departed.

Every day, the sleeping stranger was tied up to Ardeth on his camel. Every night, they moistened cloths in milk and water, pressing them between his lips to nourish him. Every day, the stranger’s skin lost a little of his pallor as his health seemed to get better.

Jonathan helped the Medjai care for the man with a patience he hadn’t demonstrated in years. He felt a strange kinship with this stranger who had almost caused his death. How could he blame him when he remembered the depth of his sadness? 

Sometimes, late in the night, when the memory of his pain was too much on his heart, he searched for Ardeth. He didn’t remember exactly what had happened in the temple, but he knew the warrior had saved his life and his sanity and he remembered his arms around his shoulders, his silent protection. Late in the nights, they talked. 

They talked about Medjai training and Oxford. They talked about what they had seen of the world. They talked about their family, Ardeth’s grandfather and uncle who had led the Medjai before him and his father whom he hadn’t known, killed in battle before his birth.They talked about Jonathan and Evelyn’s parents and how their English family had never quite accepted this union and the children resulting…

One night, Ardeth even talked about why there never would be a Mrs. Ardeth Bey, something no person outside the Medjai had ever known, and Jonathan had thanked him for his trust and admitted some youthful indiscretions, in the terms used by his Oxford peers. This night, there was no more talking but every night they sat a little closer and neither the Medjai or the O'Connell interrupted their time together, happy to see the slow progress of their dance, the seed of happiness.

************************************************************

Obi-Wan woke up.

It was the strangest thing. It felt alien, unreal. Things were definitely quite jumbled upstairs, his brain as scrambled as if he had spent a weeklong bender with what the clones pretended was alcohol, but he knew it had been longer than that, far too long. He knew he had spent more time in carbonite thant he was supposed to for their infiltration of the Citadel. Images were rushing around in his mind, and pain and anger and grief and Padme yelling and Ahsoka, tall and proud, everything a Jedi should be, and Rex’s blood on the floor and Anakin’s eyes a sickly yellow and nothing, nothing made sense.

Obi-Wan called to the Force and pushed himself into healing with the rest of his strength.

He passed out.

The next time he woke up, he could perceive people around him.

Strangers, not Force sensitive, but…friendly? Or at least, not unfriendly. But his body was still terribly weak and again, Obi-Wan called to the Force.

The third time waking was the good one.

Around him, Obi-Wan knew it was night, all souls at rest save one, at his side, and others further away. Guards, probably.

Carefully, he pushed a little in the Force and perceived no other Force Sensitive around, so he latched onto the closest person and slowly, very slowly, tipped them into sleep.

Only then did Obi-Wan open his eyes.

A stranger, dressed for the desert. Human, or humanoid…no, human.

Obi-Wan carefully stood up. Even with the healing, his steps were hesitant. How long….

He stepped out of the tent, silent as only a Jedi could be. Someone had taken his armour, and changed his clothes. He was dressed in blue like the stranger he had sent to sleep. He needed to find his armour and where he was.

But first, and most importantly, his lightsaber. He concentrated, searched into the Force, encountered a sleeping man next to the embers of a dying fire and stopped.

In the Force, not only could he perceive his own kyber crystal in his lightsaber, in another tent, but also Anakin’s lightsaber. Anakin wasn’t there, of that he was sure, the sun of his power would be impossible to miss.

Obi-Wan found his lightsaber easily and his brother’s kyber, not in Anakin lightsaber but in a strange necklace. With a shrug, he put the necklace around his neck. Evading the place where he could feel the guards, Obi-Wan stepped out of the camp.

He had only trekked two dunes when he felt Ahsoka. Strange, more powerful Ahsoka, but definitely Ahsoka. He had already understood time had passed, so when he broke into a run, he thought he would find his Grand Padawan all grown up, regal and powerful, a Knight of her own. Perhaps already a Master!

When he saw her, it was a shock.

Blue and transparent and shining, waiting for him across the dunes, compassion written on all her being.

Obi-Wan had always known he was fated for infinite sadness and he understood the time he had waited for all his life had come for him.

***************************************************************

Ardeth was the one who found him.

It had been easy to track his steps across the sand, once he had found his cousin asleep next to the covers of their strange guest, instead of standing guard.

The man was kneeling in the sand and crying. Ardeth, who already had his knife out against what he was sure was a trap, hesitated.

The man looked up and, like in the sanctuary, the Medjai took the blue of his eyes like a shock. He saw the man shoulder his pain and shake himself, with the fortitude of one who had borne too much burden too often. Then the man stood up and touched his chest.

“Obi-Wan,” he said.

“Ardeth,” the Medjai answered and Obi-Wan bowed politely.

Ardeth designated the direction they had come from, like a question, and Obi-Wan obediently started the trip back. Side by side, they walked, Obi-Wan lost in his thought, and the Medjai observing him.

It had been this man’s pain that had resonated from inside the stone.

What sort of grief could be so terrible….One day, perhaps he would know.

For now, tea and food, for the stranger and for their expedition.

They had time.

As they were approaching the first tent, Obi-Wan turned a last time and saw Ahsoka. She bowed and disappeared, probably going back to the Force, or to the New Republic, which Anakin’s children had made happen, and then his grandchildren, great grandchildren, countless generations while Obi-Wan had been prisoner in the carbonite, the module damaged, stopping him from waking up.

Across the stars, far, far away, there were still Jedi, but what could he do, for people who thought his name was an old legend? People who weren’t even sure Anakin’s Fall and the End of the First Republic hadn’t been a legend for children, with how long ago it was?

Obi-Wan, resolutely, turned to the camp. He knew the world. Whatever the strange planet he had winded up, he was pretty sure there were people to help and things to learn. Starting with their language!

A man whom Obi-Wan had never seen but who was definitely strangely familiar, like Obi-Wan knew the shape of his soul, was running to them and he threw his arms around Ardeth, before babbling something the Jedi couldn’t understand, going beet red. Ardeth answered something, his tone firm, and put an arm around the other man’s waist in return, not letting him turn away. The other man went ever more red. 

Obi-Wan smiled. Yes, people were people, whatever the species or the era. 

The other man turned to Obi-Wan and again the Jedi had this strange impression of a resonance in the Force. The man wasn’t Force Sensitive, of that Obi-Wan was sure, but he almost could have been tipped in this direction, with just a small nudge from fate. What stayed was a strange connection, when their eyes met. 

The man bowed in a fluid movement, ceremonial and old, which was pure Jedi, like he had learned from Obi-Wan himself better than Anakin ever learned it, not interested as he was in protocol, or even in being polite. 

“Jonathan,” he said and Obi-Wan gave a bow in answer and said :

“Obi-Wan,” and the man smiled and said something he didn’t understand but which, Obi-Wan would have bet his lightsaber, meant some variations of ‘ _ I know _ ’.

At the side of the two men, the Jedi entered the camp and stepped into his new life. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr too, under the same username, come and say hi!


End file.
